ic Polar Vortex [IC]

[trollthumper]

"I'm working on it," said Temperance, as she attempted to keep the eitr aloft with her will. "If we can just --"

And that was when the gigantic icicle came plummeting towards her. It moved with such speed, even from the weaker ice creature, that she was practically blindsided. She knew that, if she dodged out of the way, the eitr would hit the ground - and there was a good chance it would still hit her. She twisted, trying to avoid the worst of the blow... but there was only so much she could do with a javelin-sized icicle.

"Gaaaaaah!" For a second, the eitr faltered, almost plummeting to the ground. She gathered up her will, and refocused her efforts into the caustic poison. If it hit the ground, that would be bad for the wildlife... and possibly the water table. Channeling her pain, she hurled the fluid right at the offending ice giant. The poison struck it right in the face, and - with a cry like a collapsing glacier - it stumbled about blindly, trying to regain its footing.

"I don't think we're dealing with complex intelligences here," she said, trying very hard to stay in character. "You managed to weave an illusion that brought a flicker of fear to the more advanced jotunn. Do you think something like that could make these creatures scatter?"

[Gizmo]

"Well, it's not really an illusion so much as-- oh! Right, I can do that!" Coasting backward and upward through the air until she was in clear view, the phantom's expression grew serious as she added, "You should probably close your eyes for this." A wave of luminance exploded outward from her, light that cut chilling to the bone even in the already freezing forest. Ghost Girl's limbs stretched and thinned while her reaper's cloak rippled like the disturbed surface of a pond and took on the appearance of a sheer gown cut in sharp angles. While her hair lengthened and took on an ephemeral blue shade her face looked older, losing all trace of softness among impossibly defined cheekbones and delicately arched eyebrows. He beauty was inhuman and terrible to behold, entrancing and absolute.

"I am ice. I am death. And why should you flee," the radiant figure intoned with the same inflection as a monarch ordering an execution, "when you could kneel."

[trollthumper]

One of the ice creatures, its face still scarred by the assault of eitr, could only growl at Ghost Girl with a rasp that sounded like a continental ice shelf collapsing. But its compatriot fell to the snow on its knees, bowed in supplication to the visage of winter. A similar rasp was coming from the giant, but it was a different sound - like prayer, almost.

The angry rasp of his fellow rose in response. Temperance shook her head. Not a day old, and they're already getting in religious disputes. Then again, she wasn't the kind of girl to let an opening like that go. As the other giant rose to violently dispute its friend's interpretation of scripture, the torrent of eitr zoomed out, striking its right in the chest. More pits formed in the solid ice, but it remained upright.

"Should we let these two deal with their problems and push towards the Heart?" she asked. "Or should we make sure these two don't follow?"

[Gizmo]

"Strike him down, in my name," Ghost Girl commanded, her voice echoing imperially as she pointed toward the ice creature unaffected by her show of authority. With that said she raised both arms and disappeared in a blinding flash of light only to fade back into view next to Temperance, back in her usual, hooded form. With a broad wink to the elementalist, the poltergeist raised a hand, a slowly rotating sliver of jagged metal levitating above her open palm. "Sooner we play pin the shard on the giant the better, eh? C'mon!" Keeping close to the ground she sped off, her flight swerving around tree trunks and icy stalagmites on the the way toward the Heart.

[trollthumper]

Ymir may have been millennia dead, but it seemed there was still enough of the old titan left to know how to protect himself. Kimber found herself soaring through the labyrinthine chambers of frozen eitr, taking care to avoid the walls. There were most of these bastard children of Ymir waiting in the frozen corridors, spindly assemblages of frost and fear. But they were still half-made - it seemed their eyes had not come in, and they looked on with blank sockets as the specter flew past them.

At the end of one long and winding tunnel was a cavern, carved from green glass. The shape was rough, but the frozen eitr beneath gave Kimber a good idea of what it was - a ventricle. Inside was dark and cold - a dark that seemed to have weight and substance, and a cold that ran through her own ectoplasm, giving her sensations she hadn't felt in some time. There was a sense that whatever in there was alive but not alive - not dead, but existing on a level past life and death.

It was tangible, this darkness. Which meant it could be touched... or struck. The sliver seemed to twitch in her hand...

[Gizmo]

Kimber paused for a moment as the chill sank into her being, trying to recall just what it was that she was feeling. The poltergeist lifted her empty hand in front of her face and clenched and unclenched strangely stiff fingers a few times, twitching her nose as the prickly sensation spread from her extremities. "Huh."

Refocusing on the massive implication of an organ in front of her, she squared her shoulders and adjusted her grip on the shard of metal she'd been given. "Dunno if you can hear me at all - kinda hope not, 'cause just being a big, leaky heart with nothing to go with it sounds pretty awful - but if you can, sorry about this." Placing the sliver between her fingers so that it stuck out in front of her fist, Ghost Girl made a tight loop in the air and dove downward.

[trollthumper]

There was a moment, half a terrible second, when the darkness seemed to lash out - a reflex response from a living shadow. The sliver caught on thin air, with all the resistance of cutting through thick cloth. An exhalation filled the heart - not quite a scream, and not like a death rattle. More like an exhalation, as if something trapped was being allowed to breathe. The exhalation trailed through the air as the darkness went flat, unfurling into regular shade.

As the droning breath grew lower and lower, another noise rose above it - cracking. The icy chambers of the heart were beginning to collapse. From outside, Temperance watched as the two skeletal ice giants, ready to launch another barrage of frozen javelins, came to a complete stop. Like felled trees, they collapsed to the ground, shattering on impact. All around her, the walls began to melt at a rapid pace, the frozen eitr running off in thick, noxious rivers - but before she could pull back, the eitr began running back through the snow, towards a rapidly shrinking heart. As the walls fell, Temperance could see Velkr, Suttungr, and Heimdall - all somewhat worse for wear, but still standing. The younger jotun was wiping his hands on the snow and muttering curses, as if one of the toxic giants had come apart in his hands.

"The Heart is contained," said Heimdall. "Ymir is at rest. There is peace."

"Yeah." Temperance cast her eyes over to Velkr and Suttungr, who were still staring daggers at Heimdall. "Question is, is it gonna last longer than a few seconds?"

[Gizmo]

Ghost Girl hovered over the heart with the slowly spinning silver shard levitating over her outstretched palm, looking rather pleased with herself. She flew over to retrieve Avro from Heimdall as she spotted the Aesir and jotun approaching, giving the manticore a rigorous scratch behind the ears as he perked up in the abating cold. With a finicky yowl that made it clear that affection would be shown when and only when he demanded it, he clamoured over the phantom's arms to find his customary perch on her shoulder.
 
Finally taking notice of the hostilities between their new Norse allies, Kimber pursed her lips and floated high enough into the air to place herself in the sight lines between the Asgardian and the frost giants. "Now cut that out, all of you!" she chided with a stern frown, looking back and forth between the offending parties. "You just did good work together and we're not going to ruin it now by being a bunch of jerks for no reason! Heimdall, you can't take Ymir's heart and you know it. It's just a big scary thing to you but to the jotun it's got outrageous cultural significance and where I'm from we take that sort of thing pretty darn seriously!" The poltergeist fearlessly stared down at the all-seeing deity before whirling around on the giants. "And you two need to own up to making a big honking mess here and admit that he's got reason to be worried. If you're taking the heart back it needs to go somewhere safer and you need to make sure Heimdall can keep an eye on it, too, just in case. Fair?" Ghost Girl's tone and posture, hands on her hips, communicated that there was only one correct answer.

[trollthumper]

Heimdall and the two jotunn glared at each other for a few seconds longer. But it turned out that even the mights of Asgard and Jotunheim could falter before the onslaught of a Canadian teenaged ghost. The staredown slowly softened to a light glower, and then was gone.

"We will keep watch," said Heimdall. "The second something of significance falls out of Jotunheim..."

"It won't," said Velkr. "This was a one-time thing. Once the others learn what happened to the Heart of Ymir --"

"We'll get our hides tanned," said Suttungr.

" -- there will be - quiet - a lot less upset and a lot more consideration of what's important. Such as making sure the essence of the Father of All --"

"Is that the term you're using now?"

" -- will - again, quiet - be kept safe and secure, and not allowed to bring eternal frost to any world save our own."

Temperance looked up towards the various gods and giants. "Make sure it doesn't," she said. " I could use a little frost every now and then, but I'd rather not spend days like this fighting rabid ice monsters."

[Gizmo]

Kimber clapped her hands happily as the tension between their new friends ebbed away. "See, that wasn't so hard, right? Good day!" Eying the elder jotun brother sideways for a moment, the phantom made a snap decision and floated over to him. "Here, lemme see you arm for a sec!" When Velkr hesitatingly did so, she produced the silver sword shard she'd used to puncture the swollen heart of Ymir and quickly used it to scrawl a phone number complete with area code between the giant's wrist and elbow, the numbers appropriately large.

Floating backward, Kimber grinned and placed her hand, thumb and pinkie extended to the side of her head. "Call me!"

[trollthumper]

Velkr looked at the numbers on his forearm, studying him. "Numbers," he said. "A string of numbers. What do they --?"

"Mortal technology," said Heimdall, hiding a slight smile. "There may be a way to put you in contact. I can send a neutral emissary over to Jotunheim, set you up with a calling plan..."

"I don't know what that is, but... okay?"

As he said it, two pillars descended from the heavens, breaking through the cloudy skies. One was all the colors of the rainbow, rendered up with glorious depth; another was an elaborate bridge of dark and dusky ice. They extended up further than the eye could see, at nearly imperceptible angles. Heimdall mounted the rainbow bridge, while Velkr and Suttungr mounted the ice bridge. As Velkr gave a friendly wave to Kimber, the three started on their journeys, with each step seeming to take them several hundreds of yards. Soon, the two bridges vanished back into the heavens, and they were gone. Above them, the skies grew peaceful; where once there had been dark clouds and whipping winds, now the snow and gales were dying down. In some places, it looked like the sun was starting to break through.

Temperance turned back to Ghost Girl. "Now," she said, "about that snowman..."

[Gizmo]

"Yay!" Kimber clapped her hands and flew over to float in the air next to Temperance as they walked, Avro's scorpion-like tail swinging back and forth over the shoulder as he picked up on her excitement. "Gosh, it's a good thing we ran into each other earlier, eh? Most people would have had a lot of trouble when things got that cold! Well, I mean, a lot of the people I know are dead and they would have been fine," the phantom admitted, tapping a finger to one side of her translucent chin while ticking off the fingers of her other hand as she listed examples. "Zombies, vampires, spirits, other kinds of vampires, robot ghosts... Anyway, I should have thought of meeting more icy people too ages ago!"

[trollthumper]

Temperance smiled. "Yes, it's a good thing to meet others who walk the same paths you do," she said, trying to find a way to sound mysterious even while talking about friendship amongst the weird. "I don't often meet others who deal with ice and ephemera, or who deal with the realms invisible. I've met a few - and I think we may have met the same robot ghost - but it's still good to meet others who know the territory."

She looked out to the snowy field, which was just starting to reflect the sunlight above. She laughed. "Maybe we should post something on Meetup. 'For those with a low core temperature. Bring punch and pie.'"

[Gizmo]

"Pie à la mode!" Kimber suggested with a peal of laughter, flying in a loop-de-loop much to Avro's vocal annoyance as he dug his claws into her spectral substance to avoid falling off. She scooped him off her shoulder as she returned to an upright position, holding the manticore kitten in her arms and scratching him behind the ears until he settled down with an annoyed snort, temperamental after the long day. "I kinda doubt we're talking about the same guy, though," she continued, weaving through the intruding beams of sunlight streaming through the breaking cloud cover. "Sharl - I mean Citizen - never even actually believed I was even really a ghost no matter how many times I stuck my hand through our corporeal buddy's chest to prove it! He was all, 'science blah blah empirical evidence blah blah blah computers blah blah square root blah blah!'" Kimber rolled her eyes as she imitated her stodgy if well meaning classmate. "But you're all, 'spirits and hidden stuff ooh ahh!' He'd have annoyed the pants right off of you!"

[trollthumper]

Temperance smiled. "No, pretty sure we're still talking about the same Sharl," she said. "And yes, I've gotten quite used to that. We had our differences, but we were fairly polite about it. He saw me as interacting with extradimensional creatures I'd applied a metaphysical significance to, yes, but... well, I can't say I didn't apply my own values to him. He was a little wary when I took him to the realm of the spirits, but he tolerated it - at least until the city cancer showed up. Then it got weird."

A hint of wistfulness snuck into her grin. "Those were weird times, in many regards - hungry spirits of fame, urban predators in three-piece suits... but Sharl listened to me, even if he never really understood. I don't know what might have happened if it carried on, but... I guess I was able to see who he is and not let the whole 'metaphysical differences' thing get in the way."

[Gizmo]

Kimber looked over at Temperance and blinked several times before flitting around to float in front of the other young woman, gliding backwards through the air as they continued on their way. "Wait, you're the girl he was always talking about?!" The poltergeist's domino mask melted away as if she was concerned it was somehow impeding her vision. Looking the elementalist up and down as though seeing her for the first time she pursed her lips. "...I thought you were made up, and I actually know girlfriends who live in Canada." Avro seemed to pick up on the sentiment, leaning forward from Ghost Girl's shoulder and sniffing at Eliza, reaching out a cautious paw to bat in her direction.

[trollthumper]

Temperance took Avro's tiny paw in her hand in a somewhat fuzzy version of a handshake. "Like I said, it was a rather unconventional relationship," she said. "We first met up when dealing with spirits of fame that wanted to follow through on a rather taxing contract. Famous for fifteen minutes, then martyrdom forever. It was somewhere between the night club and the abandoned theater that we realized we'd been dancing before everything went down. We decided to give it a shot, and it turned out wonderfully."

She flashed a smile. "There may have been some slight... awkwardness at times. But he did care, even if he didn't wholly grasp. We had a great time together."